but I’ve been meaning to share some Sci-Fi with you recently anyway, so here’s some. It’s from my next book WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and it is a triumphant return for Tin Foil Tim, a fan favourite character from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?

I don’t do trigger warnings, but since we are online and you’ve not picked up the book and pored / pawed your way through it to this page, I feel I probably should tell you that there’s stuff about cattle mutilation, alien abductions, and very brief suicide mention in this story. There’s also foil underpants, and a beef burger.

Who Killed The Cows, Man?

A tweed-clad man with round glasses and rustling trousers ambled into the lecture theatre from the leftward entrance.

“You are late, Mister Tim,” he scolded himself in a mock-nasal tone. Several students laughed, whilst others privately calculated just how much of their student loans they had lost to these mysterious exhibitions.

“If any of you were wondering, the new cover of my old book just came in.” Tim slammed a striped paper bag down on the side of his lectern, grimacing as the mic, already on, picked up a whining ghost of the sound.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. Then, remembering an old promise, clapped his right hand toward the assembled students by rapping his fingertips against the palm. One of the students got half way out of their chair and launched a plastic-wrapped muffin Tim’s way.

“Thank you Alan,” Tim said. “As I was saying. Old book, new cover. Behold.”

As the professor unwrapped the books he had removed from the library, and the singular new edition he had also removed from the library, the students chattered amongst themselves.

“I hear he’s took the alien off the front,” said a redhead.

“Too graphic. Distancing himself from the probing thing.”

“Still calls himself ‘Tin foil Tim’ though, doesn’t he?”

“Of course. You can hear his underpants crumping during one to ones.”

“Crumpling,” another student corrected.

“No. Crumping.”

“Creasing, rustling. Like his balls are old leaves.”

“Old leafy balls Tin foil Tim.”

“Hey Alan, does Tim have leafy balls?” teased one student, playfully.

“No, but your mum does,” Alan snapped back.

“Enough about my deciduous testicles,” professor Tim said, surprising the students with his above average hearing. “They’ve got my name wrong.”

“What does it say?” asked Alan.

“Tim foil Tin.”

“Ah that’s not too bad, most people won’t notice it,” the redheaded student replied. Alan nodded in agreement.

“Well that’s not the point, is it? I don’t much care if readers notice, as long as they enjoyed the book. What bothers me is that I notice, and more importantly, that this thing went through seven rounds of edits. There’s a typo in the first one you know.”

“And nobody cared,” another female student said, reassuringly.

“But is the cover good?” a second asked.

“Oh, it’s very good,” Tim smiled. He held aloft one of each edition. The older edition depicted a handsome alien with its arms around Tin foil Tim, covering his private parts.

“I will never understand why the publisher made me change it to this,” Tim said. “Sales rose, sure, but why? What kind of person would want this in their front room?”

The later edition of Who Probed The Humans? featured a shadowy hill, a silhouetted UFO, and pine trees. It was much more ominous, and felt much less like the cover to some cheap dirty magazine.

“Can we start the lecture now please, we have exams in a few weeks,” one student asked.

“Nerd,” professor Tim quipped. He put the books down, pressed the remote control in his jacket pocket, and the huge screen behind the lectern lit up.

“You had that on you the whole time?”

“I was busy. You know once you get out of university, if you get out, you might need social skills to navigate the world. Consider the preceding minutes as a starter course in talking to humans,” Tim said. He stretched, cracking his knuckles and adjusting his tweed jacket, stroking the velvet elbow patches, an old habit.

Behind him the giant whiteboard had an image projected upon it. A farmer’s field in the early morning. All the cows dead. All faces and eyes removed with surgical precision. No blood.

He clicked the clicker in his hand and watched as the image changed. This time it was a close-up. This particular cow had small burn marks made below the nasal cavity, and what appeared to be tiny boreholes at the top of the skull.

“Can anyone suggest what fate may have befallen these bovines?” Tin foil Tim said, his undertrousers rustling.

“Angry horse,” yelled one student.

“Nope.”

“Vengeful horse?” yelled another.

“No.”

“Horseplay gone wrong?” bellowed a third.

“I am deducting final marks off anyone who mentions horses,” Tin foil Tim said.

“I have a theory,” said a boring looking man in a crisp black suit. Tim did not recognise this student, but it was always nice to have more seats filled, so he didn’t think to quiz them about it.

“Go on,” Tim prompted. The man adjusted his black sunglasses.

“It was a suicide.”

The audience, Tim’s students, turned to this mysterious stranger, then moved their attention to their professor. It was no secret that Tin foil Tim had loosened his grasp on intergalactic ‘conspiracies’ in recent years, but surely this inane suggestion would reignite that conspiratorial flame in his heart.

Tin foil Tim hummed, grumbled, lifted a finger as if to begin a rant about interdimensional space crabs. Then he stopped himself.

“You know, you may have a point,” the professor said. Clearly he had left his soul in his other tweed suit. His biggest fans shook their heads, and the other students barely lifted theirs off their desks.

“You know, I thought it would be aliens.” One student looked over her notebook. Professor Tin foil Tim pretended not to hear her.

“He’s finally lost his mind,” another student said.

“No, he’s pacing the room. He must still be smart!” a Alan interjected, without a hint of sarcasm. By the looks of him, he had modelled himself after the aging professor pacing helplessly below.

“Thank you, Alan,” Tin foil Tim said.

“Aluminium Alan,” Alan’s friend said, tapping his friend on the shoulder with a friendly fist.

“Quite right, though I assure you I am undeserving of the fandom. Regardless. I like to hope I still have my wits about me, and I hope the rest of you can see through my more rebellious, conspiratorial age and engage in conversation about this case.”

He clicked the clicker again, bringing the students’ attention back to the whiteboard. Upon it was an image of a floating ball of greenish-blue light, hovering low above the farmer’s field.

One student stuck her hand up in the air.

“Professor. Is that an alien ship?”

“No,” Tin foil Tim replied. “It’s a whiteboard.”

“I mean in the picture.”

“Oh. No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s swamp gas,” the mystery student said.

“Aliens,” another student chimed in.

“Aliens don’t exist.” said Tin foil Tim, stunning the room into silence.

“What?!”

“Well, those specific aliens don’t exist.” Tin foil Tim’s voice echoed back at him from the back of the lecture theatre as a dim murmur. Some years ago, that arrangement of words would have made him hysterical with laughter.

“But what about your books?” Alan asked. Tin foil Tim could almost hear his admirer’s heart breaking into pieces.

“Well,” Tin foil Tim began. He removed his hands from his pockets and began gesturing as he spoke. “I would hope that my early work is still valuable literature even though I have moved beyond its framing. The message, after all, is not the messenger. I believe I should have been clearer, however. What I mean to say is that the aliens that abduct cows are not real. Cows lack both the means and the motive to develop interstellar travel and later time travel, so there would be no reason for some future cows to loop back and experiment with their own ancestors in some bizarre incestuous paradox, as aliens did with us,” he explained.

“But I thought you said alien intervention explains away anything,” a young woman replied. She was sat with a beef burger in one hand, phone in the other. Tin foil Tim raised a curious eyebrow her way.

“Oh, I’m a long way beyond that Cynthia. I realise now that I had entrapped myself in the very same conceptual cage which I would often paint around my adversaries, namely that I invented my own ‘god’ figure to magically insert itself in any gap that needed filling,” Tin foil Tim said. A student chuckled in the background, but Tim continued, “Except that ‘god’ was a little green alien.”

Cynthia nodded to signal her understanding. Aluminium Alan adjusted his home-made elbow pads and sighed.

“So, aliens are still real, just not ones that abduct cows?”

“Yes,” Tin foil Tim replied. “There is simply no reason to abduct a cow. What would be the point? What could one glean from a cow abduction? What secrets are held within cow brains that we do not already know?”

There was a long silence. Nobody had an answer because it was true. Cow brains had been extensively mapped; all their secrets were out. There was nothing within a cow that was not known by even the most idiotic human toddler. Cow science was the first complete science. Humans had even done the bonus levels.

“What we are to do here today,” Tim said confidently, trousers rustling, “Is to probe the deepest annals of human thought, to fully and passionately penetrate this matter. And in doing so we need to create some truly seminal research.”

The students were listening at last. Tin Foil Tim walked back to the whiteboard and clicked the clicker again. He swiped a few more times until he came across a picture of seventeen cows lying dead in a circle.

“Brains removed. Complete exsanguination. That’s removal of the blood. Eyes removed. In some cases, tongues too. Write that down, not all of them lost their tongues.”

The students scribbled hastily in their notebooks. Cynthia took a photo of the whiteboard.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Tin Foil Tim asked.

“Saving notes.”

“How are you expected to recall context from a single blurry photograph?”

“You managed,” Cynthia said under her breath. Professor Tin foil Tim raised an indignant eyebrow this time, lowered his shoulders, and considered defeat.

“No,” he said. “That was different. Here you have the choice of clarity, of using your brain, which may I remind you aliens have yet to scoop out, unless I am sorely mistaken, and process what you are reading. You have the privilege of a mind, and by proxy the obligation to use it, for the benefit of your species.”

Cynthia shrugged and took another bite of her burger.

END (for now)

You can’t order WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? yet as it’s currently being edited, a Kickstarter may show up soon. For now, why not try the first book? It’s only £1 right now (limited time).

You can read the books in this series in any order. They are weird, multifaceted, multidimensional short story collections. For example in WBTH, the 11 universes are split across 47 chapters. If you read the book left-to-right you explore them all with equal attention, but the book actively invites you to try other routes, giving you teleport pads and dimensional wormholes through which to follow your favourite story to its conclusion quicker, leaving behind jokes and tales you can rediscover later.

It’s good, basically. I need to get better at marketing it, but it’s good.

You’ll like it.

https://books2read.com/wbthspecial?format=ebook

For this reason I must inform you that the following story contains:

• Inbred fish

• A bit more time travel

• Cousin marriage jokes

• Meta comedy about the last book

• Time travel

• Australian lizard people with erectile issues

• A horse which contains the entire universe

• A sentient missile that tries to kill itself using, you guessed it, time travel

• One instance of someone reading a road sign

• Plastic foliage

• Cave people

• Golden machines bashed into nothingness by aforementioned cave people

• A medium sized bush

I think that’s everything. Let’s move onward and sideward.

Hello everyone.

Wait. I have an announcement.

Carmen has won a $20 book voucher (or equally valued thing I find in my cupboard) for bringing three of her friends to this publication! I ran this small promo last year using Substack’s in-built leaderboard.

And now Carmen has become the first person to bring three friends here, I must now come up with a new prize. Comments are open.

But first, the story.

This story was written very recently. Now that the pre-orders for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS got cancelled (unless you’ve got them on crowdfundr, in which case you can ask for a cancellation any time and I’ll accept it, but if you wait you’ll still get your stuff eventually) I had a bit more time to sit and think. Here are the things I thunk with my brain.

1. Having burnout is not fun or nice. I dislike it

2. Gordon and Arrogance should at some point befriend a fish

3. That fish should have a weird backstory

4. More time travel

5. If I am bringing these WHO BUILT THE HUMANS characters back for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS, I cannot do so with a careful quill. I must abandon any caution and reclaim the weirdness that make WBTH so great

6. What if reptilian shapeshifters had Australian accents and snorted human skull powder as an aphrodisiac?

7. What if posted the story free as thanks to my fans?

Here are your answers.

My brother the fish

Part 1

(Note, you will be reading part 2 shortly, it’s just that in the past, people have told me emails longer than 2000 words are a bit overwhelming. I’ve listened, and this story is now a two-parter).

Enjoy,

Gord stumbled his way through the thick bracken that separated the town of Syrupy Giblets from Finnicky Gimmick technology park. Arrogance Deluxe walked beside him, on the pavement, like a normal person.

“I told you, we need to use stealth,” Gord said, emerging from the bushes. He looked up at the beautiful monument to brutalism that was the Finnicky Gimmick offices and laboratories.

“This is where Missy the Missile was made, will be made, won’t be made,” Arrogance said in wonder. “It’s been here all this time, the end of all things.”

They stopped for a moment by a road sign which had been graffitied. The town just North of Syrupy Giblets had been named, on most street signs, as ‘Seedy Inbreedy’ when in fact it was called [insert name of reader’s hometown].

“Are the rumours about that place true?” Arrogance asked. It was now that Gord remembered she wasn’t a native, and wasn’t yet accustomed to the hideous rumours and legends that surrounded this possibly coastal town.

“My mate had a girlfriend from there once, she could breathe out of her bottom,” Gordon said.

“Remind me why we’re dating?” Arrogance said. She brushed the leaves off Gord’s messy old jacket. He was very pleased with the opportunity to tell a story.

“We’d always admired each other for bluntly being who we really were, with no pretence.”

“I do love your sudden bouts of seriousness,” Arrogance confirmed. Gordon nodded, continuing.

“We’d lost touch for a few years, but then a stroke of luck hit when a young boy called Tim put his football through my greenhouse, snuffing the society I had imagined lived within my strawberry patch.”

“Ah yes, the indecent exposure,” Arrogance said.

“It was a loose robe and a windy day. Anyway, my running from the investigators meant I needed somewhere to hide, and what better place than A Touch Of Genius, your former employer. Where you were disguised as Albert Einstein.”

The pair of them made their way onto the car park, noted the lack of security in the booths, the holes in the tarmac, the panicked quivering of security cameras, one of which had little robot arms that covered its ‘eye’.

“I still have that beard,” Arrogance said, winking.

“And you are still my ‘special relative’,” Gordon said.

Gordon tried to subdue his arousal and stepped closer to the building. They made their way inside place without incident. Gord took a leaf from the plastic plant in the big pot by reception. There was a lady behind the desk, polite and unperturbed by intruders. Behind her was an appropriately sized aquarium, within which could be seen a single goldfish working its way in and out of the eye sockets of a fake human skull.

“Hello, do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“We are time travellers, sent back to stop Missy the Missile from ever coming into existence,” Gordon said honestly.

“Who is Missy the Missile?” the receptionist asked.

“Perfect, we are right on time.”

Arrogance barely had time to shake her head before the receptionist pointed the pair to a corridor and a waiting room, within which was a smorgasbord of strangely dressed characters. A makeshift sign had been created from a propped-up whiteboard, which simply read ‘time travellers and the chronologically challenged. Wait time two hours give or take’.

“How can the wait time be two hours, we’ve time travelled?” Arrogance said. Her boyfriend was not too sure. “I’m not too sure,” he said, thus cementing the fact he was not too sure. Nonetheless the pair sat down on their seats, which has already been labelled for them, and waited. The room was a pale green, the colour of grasshopper puke. A darkened pine trim brought to mind the 1980s, but the clientele brought to mind every other era that had, or would soon, exist.

To the pair’s left was a trio of Victorian women chatting amongst themselves.

“What are you in for?” one of them asked.

“Trying to stop a missile from annihilating a horse that contains the universe,” Gordon explained. The Victorian lady nodded.

“We been picking the pockets of meandering chrononauts,” she happily proclaimed. She plucked a golden needle from a fashionable corset.

“This is the key to their machine,” she said.

“And where’s the machine?” Arrogance Deluxe asked. The Victorian ladies pointed across the waiting room, to a small tribe of cavepeople who had made a shining pancake out of the delicate gold machinery.

“We think they built them fragile for this reason specifically mister. That a wise chrononaut does not leave their vehicle unattended, and in the event of their death triggers a reaction in the metal that makes it both soft, and incredibly attractive to our primordial cousins,” one of the Victorian ladies said. She took the time machine key and tossed it to the cavepeople, who very quickly folded it into nothingness, but not before jabbing one of their number in the eye.

A large flatscreen TV set into one wall now displayed a message.

“Time travellers are encouraged not to share information that might lead to the fragmentation of the current timeline, or the creation of new timelines,” the receptionist’s tired voice came through the speakers. Gordon nodded a goodbye to the Victorians, but leaned in toward his girlfriend.

“And who do you think they are?” he asked, glancing diagonally across the room. Two time travellers, a man and a woman, their faces obscured by a localised spacetime well so as to hide their identities, were talking to each other about black hole cosmology in the corner of the room. The man wore a flowing brown and red scarf, and the woman wore a crucifix necklace and blue dress.

“Cosplayers, whatever those are,” a reptilian beside Arrogance whispered in a thick Australian accent, briefly lowering his sunglasses. “Dressing up as their favourite time travellers from fiction, fell into a time hole themselves because some temporal editors or something thought their costume was the real thing. And before you ask, had a few too many at my pal’s wedding, woke up on a parallel Earth.”

“It happens,” Gord said. He fist-bumped the green-skinned reptilian, who smiled broadly and put his sunglasses back on. The reptilian took a bag of white powder from a shoulder bag and prepared to sniff it, but he saw Gord looking.

“Do you… you don’t want some, do you?”

“After my adventure, might as well,” Gordon said.

“You don’t know what it is.”

“I think I do,” Gordon said. Arrogance moved subtly, making the space between Gordon and the reptilian wider.

“I thought we’d be saving the universe sober,” she said.

“Sorry honey,” Gordon said. “Old habits.”

“It’s for the best,” said the suave reptilian. “This ain’t coke.”

“What is it then?”

“You sure you want to know?”

“I want to know everything, it’s a psychological affliction.”

“Alright then mate. It’s human bone.”

“Human bone?”

“Powdered. It’s a potent aphrodisiac.”

“A bone for a bone,” Arrogance quipped.

“That’s good, can I use that?”

“No.”

END

See you next week for part 2.

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Cancel me

I Spy

A message to my 19 WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? pre-order humans.

You will have gotten an email a few days ago from Amazon, apologising for your pre-order being cancelled. I got the email too, and it was a surprise. I had submitted the document on time, and was excited for it to launch.

But apparently I missed one tiny detail.

And that derailed the whole thing.

I missed the detail because I was, and am, exhausted.

This is not conducive to producing weird, twisty literature.

Even this post sits somewhere outside the limits of my comprehension, so I apologise if I repeat myself.

Long story short, I’m too tired to do things properly any more.

Short story long: I got a message the morning after the deadline that I had not submitted the manuscript in time. I had, but I’d fallen asleep from exhaustion at my desk at 11:26pm, just over half an hour before the deadline. I had thought this would be okay. Sure, it’s last-minute, but the manuscript was there. It was uploaded. I could see it.

For context, I got a pretty hectic day job as an alternative to borrowing money from business loans companies, so I could grow Halfplanet Press, but this combined with a few personal chaoses (good word) has meant I now have a new system for working on what I love. I log off from work in the late afternoon, go immediately to bed with a headache, wake up somewhere around 10pm, and write until 2am. Rinse and repeat.

This works okay, but I vastly underestimated just how tired it would make me.

I had the chance to delay the pre-order by another month, but Amazon would have revoked my pre-order launching ability for a whole year, and with another THE STEPHANIE GLITCH novella on the way, this seemed dangerous to my future projects.

My file was complete, so I put it on the system.

But this was not enough. Apparently, I needed to click “Okay” somewhere at the bottom to confirm the upload, and I forgot to do that when I was snoozing on my space bar.

That small mistake has led to the obliteration of 19 pre-orders, leading to my cancelling of several adverts I was to run, and a demotion from my lofty place in the top 1000 science fiction books on Amazon. I had earned that title for WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? long before it was due to come out, thanks to you pre-ordering it.

The person I was six months ago would have had failsafes in place. He would have the pre-order file uploaded months before the deadline. But he wasn’t tired all the time. I’m pissed off, to be honest. And I will understand if you are, too.

There is some good news. The book is finished, and I am going to use this as an opportunity for rebirth. Mainly, I want to sneak in one final story that I had to cut due to my new time constraints.

I have spoken to Amazon about it and explained in some detail my circumstances (I am not the type to send books in so close to deadlines. Maybe essays, but never books) and they agreed to give me some much-needed slack. I can relaunch the pre-orders at any time, when I feel ready.

Further complications

Amazon’s first agent left the chatroom prematurely, so I had to grab another who told me I could not reuse my ISBN. This seemed unfair, and I am glad I still remember how to stand up for myself and ask questions, because he turned around and told me I was right: I can keep the same ISBN when I relaunch.

The old page for Who Killed The Humans? will dissolve in a few days, and a new page will take its place.

Do you remember the first time?

In April 2024 I went to Utah to tell jokes to Mormons about polygamy. I also wrote quite a bit of Who Killed The Humans? onto a document on my phone, using a bluetooth keyboard I took with me on the plane. My goal was to have a road trip to Roswell and write some of WKTH and the Earthloop trilogy there, but that didn’t happen in the end. I stayed in Utah for the duration.

I was offered a job with the UK government whilst I was out in the desert, and had to do the needlessly time-limited security and health checks whilst in the shower at my friend’s garage, because nowhere else had wifi. Turns out nobody else had to do these, so I am wondering if it was a humilation ritual reserved for the self-employed.

I was in the middle of showering when I found out I was locked in. I was offered a position in an office in another city, which I thought was odd because I’d applied for a work from home job (very good if you have migraines, you get to sit with cats on your break (cats not included)).

Born to cry

A melodramatic title for this chapter, but it’s part of the later quiz.

So I got the job. I returned to the UK via Utah, Chicago, and Ireland. I abandoned my cool new beard gel in Chicago because I’d joined the queue for people without liquids. I retained my cat-shaped cooling pad however, and did the usual dance of explaining to security I was about to put a giant lithium battery through the X-Ray machine. They are fine with portable chargers provided you disclose them.

I went to my last live music gig (Gary Numan) in July, and started my fancy new job in August 2024. I had applied for a work from home, part time thing, on account of having some caring responsibilities, and not wanting to bring back those migraines I used to get all the time as a kid and teenager.

But, like a shit 2000s boy band, the migraines returned conjoined at the skinny jeans and malformed testicles, determined to ruin my blood flow, my flow state, and my will to carry on. They also cost me about as money as a shit 2000s boy band reunion, because I am burning through earplugs like your washing machine.

Also, turns out my new job was an office job.

I packaged up my hippy soul, my washed-up hair, and trimmed my beard only a tiny bit, so the moths would stop nesting in there. I wouldn’t want them getting lost in government buildings, people might suppose they were manifestations of the dismay of the British Working Class or something, and poets might turn up to take photos of them. I hate poets.

On day one, I wore a suit, and quickly realised I was overdressed.

The office had construction work in the room next to mine for the first three months. The longest migraine I had during that time lasted six days. It was punctuated only by a passive-aggressive email about the smell of marijuana in the office, which I proposed might not be due to the people inside the office, but someone outside. This theory became a hot topic until the builders left the space near the open window, and the smell mysteriously vanished.

I will say, as an aside, I would get back into watching the television if they had a show where you give builders drugs and have sports commentary over footage of them trying to make things with heavy machinery.

Meanwhile, in reality, the flourescent lights flickered in a way most people could not see, and some chose not to believe, as if I was disclosing my ability to communicate psychically with shellfish, rather than an established and researched neurological phenomenon.

Later, I would discover that an ability to see flickering lights is a common thing with autism and ADHD. Neat, but utterly useless to know because I am not about to blast £2000 on a diagnosis when there’s new Lego coming out.

The social schism between myself and the humans was such that I felt very isolated within the first week. I have never been lonelier than I am when I am trapped in a mass of people who I do not understand or relate to, but the pay was good, and I like buying adverts for my books.

(I have not had time to run adverts, hence Free Fiction Friday slowing down).

It got to the point I was so dizzy in the office that I wound up being assessed by their on-site disability people. Turns out migraines all the time is a disability, so I’ve had to grapple with the horrendous realisation that if I now do comedy in which I am a character (which I usually am), I might be punching down onto myself. Now, as a comedian, I have to apologise to myself in a tearful youtube video every time I make a joke about myself. It’s not too hard because I’m also a poet, so I use my faux-sensitive side for the apologies. Still, this is very quickly taking up all the storage space on my phone.

Something Changed

We were, at some point, talking about WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

It was, and still will be, a collection of interconnected sci-fi and comedy stories.

I had a pretty good writing session in November 2024, when my doctor signed me off for four weeks due to stress. I still had to attend meetings at work to establish how sick I was and when I’d return (the clue was on the sick note - four weeks), but for the most part I was free to be myself again.

No more masking.

I spent the first week recovering, the two in the middle on writing, and the fourth was spent marinating in - and refining a type of dread previously only afforded to Neanderthals kicked forward through time and thrown into endless grey hallways. To them, the modern world must feel like an alien abduction.

I’m bordering on feral, I get it, it’s part of my charm when I do standup, and it helps at the poetry nights too, but it doesn’t translate everywhere. It’s like being really good at making balloon animals with condoms. Funny outside a pub at 2am, sure, but probably not the sort of skill to put on your job application.

Anyway, my time off sick was the most productive slab of time I have waded through all year. I set up an advert for my time travel novella THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE, had a radio interview, and briefly got back into standup comedy. I didn’t, as I would tell my coworkers upon my return, just sit back and chill out and drink tea. That’s what they wanted to hear, but the neurowyrd truth is that if I sit down not doing much then I get bored of my own company. I need to write.

I have been writing for as long as I remember.

I wrote my first sci-fi poem when I was five years old.

I will write my last in the moments before the asteroid strikes, and nobody will laugh as hard as I will.

Countdown

Unfortunately I got better, and it was back to nightly double naps and spending most of my energy adapting to the humans. My two-week writing stint got me another 20,000 or so words into the Who Killed The Humans? manuscript, and I managed to polish these on my breaks.

However, it would not be enough.

The other night, my head drifted inexorably forward, landing with my nose on the touchpad, as my book both was and was not submitted to Amazon.

I’d gotten the little textbox.

I’d read the message.

I thought it was done.

The project I had worked hard on for over a year was scuppered in one evening because of a lapse in my concentration brought on by the very same exhaustostress that had me plucking an antenna-like grey hair from the geometric centre of my scalp last night, wondering if my hair was falling out again.

I realised pretty quickly the other day that I had, in one moment, lost those nineteen pre-orders I worked for, and nineteen people out there in the world got emails telling them that the author they trusted had screwed up.

If you are one of those people, I am sorry.

I planned to release one of the WKTH stories on its own as a promo thing. I am still going to do that, but I think I will make this story free now, so you can all enjoy it while you wait for the final big book to be ready.

Does that sound good?

My legendary girlfriend

The titles of the chapters of this email were references to songs by which British band or musician?

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I am now in a strange position. I will take this opportunity to start again, relaunching pre-orders and seriously considering where I am headed as an artist, as a person. It’s evident now that I didn’t get better last November. I’m still sick, but it is a sickness that is hard to define.

I remember a timeline more jagged, more strange.

I will find that timeline again.

Goodnight fellow lizard people.

I may also make a bagel. That is another of my favourite things.

I also could not help but make a present joke, which is a hint at the story I include in this email.

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope it’s a good one. If you’ve got the time to open and read this email, thank you for choosing to spend that time here.

I’ve got a Lego dinosaur this Christmas, so I am sorted.

Below is a time travel story I wrote as a microfiction in 2015. Looking back, I realise a lot of my writing is about time, either directly or indirectly, and that perhaps I should make this my brand for some future adverts.

Anyway, this story is called THE INTERTEMPORAL HOTEL but back in 2015 it was only called INTERTEMPORAL, and it became my first published story over on the now dead postcardshorts. Back then it was a microfiction.

I’ve also decided to place this story inside the EARTHLOOP universe. In that universe Brigid Pearson has written it, and it’s her first published story, too.

I know, weird choice, but all my best creative choices are weird.

About pen names, you can expect more Rod Grasper action in 2025.

But right now, you can read THE INTERTEMPORAL HOTEL for free on Substack. No downloads, no tech wizardry required. Just click the thing below and you can read it here in this newsletter.

The Intertemporal Hotel is a sci-fi with very slight romance elements featuring a little nod to quantum immortality, amongst other things.

Note: The book mentioned in the post, Seven Stories about Time Travel, got shelved in favour of making WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? instead. SSATT and the other books in that planned series will still arrive someday, but I want more time to meditate on their direction, as I did when I began redrafting THE STEPHANIE GLITCH in 2021. Since I write most of these books all at the same time, my process feels very organic and sensible when I’m exploring the universes in the pilot’s seat, but I know it can come across jagged and mysterious from the outside as I’m zooming around referencing different stories, so I thought I’d explain.

SSATT is happening one day.

WKTH is happening on March 5th 2025.

See you all in a few days!

It’s a very fun story, and the tonal opposite to Mycelial, my very serious sci-fi horror about mushrooms. You see, in Who Killed The Humans? realities sometimes fracture, giving you the reader the choice of where to go.

My hope in sharing this excerpt here for free is that you might fall so madly in love with my poetic and comedic sci-fi storytelling that you rush to pre-order the book on Amazon.

If I have 100 pre-orders, the book will blow up in popularity.

And, if you pre-order now, you get it at a reduced price, because the price changes when the book comes out on March 5th 2025.

Anyway, let’s read the story.

Who Baked The Shroomans?

“No, you’re doing it wrong. I said in the gills!” she shook her bulbous head, slapping the pipe from under his. The two Shroomans laughed together in slow motion, toying with spores as they dangled soundlessly in damp air.

“I just, I’m nervous,” he admitted.

“It’s just Receptionist Blues. Nothing too strong.”

“I know but, what if she hated her job, what if it makes me angry?”

“I’m bigger than you,” she said reassuringly. “Just take it. It will be okay.”

The male Shrooman picked up the pipe again, gazed with green mutant eyes at the tiny biped trapped within. Spores had slowed the creature’s metabolism down so that it barely realised what was happening. The human could be smoked and toked and poked by a whole circle of stoner Shroomans, then put back into its own timeline without many side effects. Of course the best ways to access its complex neurology and hormones were often invasive, but most of them didn’t remember, and those that did quickly forgot.

To the receptionist, the giant circle in the sky came and went so fast she could pretend she never saw it. The worst that came of the encounter was a migraine, and a strange aversion to eating mushrooms that lasted several weeks.

“What’s her name?” the male Shrooman said.

“What?”

“Her name.”

“Do you name all your drugs?”

“I know they have names,” the male Shrooman said.

“We don’t have names.”

“We do, we just don’t say them.”

“We don’t.”

“We definitely do.”

“Go on then. What’s my name?” the female Shrooman asked. She took the pipe back, set the human down, and let it walk around a bit. She leaned a mycelial chin on vast tentacled hands as the biped sluggishly moved around.

“I like to call you Sequence.”

“Why?”

“You have that pattern up the side of your head, like a language.”

“And what shall I call you?” Sequence asked the male.

“Ooooouuull.”

“Is that a name or a neurological event?” Sequence asked. Her gills flared, ten-thousand open lungs, and secreted something like a cloud over the dollhouse world between them. This was mushroom laughter.

“Ooooouuull is a name and a title,” Ooooouuull explained.

“Right. And what does it mean?”

“It is the first sound I felt in this world, in my fibrous body. A sort of wave of thinking that made me alive.”

“Ooooouuull,” Sequence repeated.

“Ooooouuull.”

“So are you taking the human?” Sequence asked.

“I want her name first,” Ooooouuull said. Sequence lowered herself into the watery atmosphere of this planet, dropping down between the trees, her body pulsing and flickering with light, the fields beneath her mass twisting into geometric patterns that followed the complex energies emanating from her. The wheat buckled and crackled, projecting Sequence’s genetic code into a bowing and standing of plants, a painting put onto the planet in an instant, electromagnetically seared into the crops in concentric geometric patterns.

“Why?” she asked, even as she sucked the name from the world.

“I think it will help me get in the mood.”

“We’re smoking them, not fucking them,” Sequence twisted her bulbous cap in the air, aligning herself with the thoughtweb of the world.

“You’re talking like one, you’ll be gone soon.”

“And you’re not at risk of convergence yourself, knowing its name?”

“I want to know her name,” Ooooouuull asserted himself.

“Her name is Rhonda, Rhonda the receptionist.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Don’t think too much about it. They all do after a while.”

From above the world, Ooooouuull could see the closed eighth eye atop Sequence’s head. It was a dark crystalline green, the pinnacle of mycelial symbiosis with living minerals. It was an evolved rite of passage, an eye that specifically opened only when a Shrooman was high enough to realise something totally mega, like if they could feel music resonating through their teeth, and were too high to remember they didn’t have teeth. Or if they realised that the true nature of time was a spiral, and that the spiral was not a tightly wound thing but a swirling trajectory like a strand of DNA, corkscrewing through reality, and that spiral staircases also looked like that, so fancy human structures were basically a metaphor for the universe and Shroomans were basically a metaphor for themselves, or something. And time is a flower unfurling, a night out dissolving into the memories of its participants, dude. Is there any good food in the fridge? My eyes feel furry. Books are basically astral projection made physical, a psychic object which reprograms the uppermost layers of your mind which you choose to open up when you open the book.

You open book.

Book opens you.

That sort of revelation.

Anyway, Sequence’s magic eighth eye had not opened yet because she saw herself as more of a guiding spirit for other aspiring skull-gobblers, a leader figure. She figured this one out on her gap year. That was her excuse anyway. She inhaled deeply now, taking the human up from its containment chamber and into her head. Deep inside her gills, Rhonda the receptionist swirled and floated soundlessly, itching in this strange void. If she was conscious and more receptive to psychic energy, she might have noticed someone had died here once, the results of a breath held too long for Sequence, which bereaved a young human family of its matriarch. It didn’t matter though, the psychocrop was strong and yielded good results. Sure, they weren’t breeding as much these days, and they’d likely go extinct by 2379, but they had some weird experiences that made even the dullest of humans worth consuming. There was always the backup farm on Mars, anyway, and Sequence’s older brother had that mini fridge in his apartment on Europa with some prime neanderthal dankness ready to go.

She exhaled. Rhonda the receptionist flitted back through the membrane inside the pipe, and her dozy body drifted in the dense atmosphere.

“Oh fuck, that was a dense one,” Rhonda coughed.

The report was due by Friday. Sci-Fi Stevie was freaking out by the water cooler, copycat Carl was making a fool of himself, and the clouds outside were perfect circles, hideous surreal things that reminded Rhonda of mushroom caps. The cover was a triangle, for a while. No idea what that means. Sequence was feeling around the room for meaning, for a title, a name, a purpose.

“I’m a regional stock management procurement go-between pre-meeting meeting facilitator,” she said.

“Fuck is that?” replied Ooooouuull. Sequence, eyes closed, shrugged in the peculiar way sentient mushrooms shrug, opening heavy flaps on her shoulders to expel spores. Her friend’s idle intrusion briefly bent the illusion, giving Sequence a way out, something real to hold onto. She closed her eyes tight and opened them, tightened and opened, tightened and opened, until flecks of kaleidoscopic colour took over.

“I’ve got a thing due by the time with the person,” she said. The high was already wearing off. Rhonda the receptionist wasn’t as strong as some others because she cared less about what she was doing. And now she was beginning to pick up on what was going down. The two Shroomans felt it in the air, that wave of mammalian realisation that meant it would soon be time to return the primate to its rightful place on the planet’s surface.

Ooooouuull took his friend by one of her many tentacles, and helped her eject the human from her sensory cavity.

“We need something stronger, someone weirder,” Sequence said.

Want to read more?

Pre-order WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

Price is discounted until release day.

Pre-ordering it could make 2025 the year I become a full-time writer.

Notes on the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? series

• Whilst WKTH is not a direct sequel to Who Built The Humans?, both books share some universes, so if you do have the first one you’ll find new layers of jokes and storytelling.

• Some characters return for WKTH, but you don’t need to have read WBTH to understand it. Both books are written to be read individually.

• As well as mushrooms, there is a magic horse, a talking fish, and a sentient missile determined to erase its own past.

• The book will feature on BBC radio.

I have a regular Free Fiction Friday coming tomorrow night, but right now I want to show you a story I wrote back in 2020.

It’s called ONCE THERE WERE OTHERS, and it follows two alien archaeologists as they hunt for an ancient technology that can reignite dying stars. It is one of my favourite stories.

The star resurrection tech is important to them, because at the time the story is set, less than 100 stars exist in the universe, and all of them are dying.

This story is set in the far future of all my stories, and paints a dark picture of those final days for reality in which the last sentient race of beings are scrambling desperately to find a way to outlive the cosmos, whilst at the same time keeping the end of time secret from the public.

These froglike aliens are part of an elite scientific crew, and only they know that the universe is dying.

And for a limited time, the story is totally free.

Once There Were Others - Amazon

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNX7G71M

Not got Amazon? I don’t want you to miss out. Here’s a link for ONCE THERE WERE OTHERS which covers lots of other retailers.

Once There Were Others - Everywhere else

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https://books2read.com/oncetherewereothers

Escaping the algorithm

You’ll notice this post in the WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? section of my newsletter. That’s because the story originally came out in the first book, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? But if you already have that book, I must ask you to download the free eBook anyway, for no reason other than to help me clamber my way up the Amazon rankings.

You see, I republished it so it could have its own space to breathe, and it seems to be doing okay! I didn’t expect it to be this popular, and it is not far away from climbing to the top, so I thought I would ask for help getting it there.

You get a free story out of this, and I hopefully get to brag about how amazing and popular and handsome I am.

It’s a good story, one of my favourites, which is why I chose it to be republished on its own. It deserves this extra attention.

I am hoping that, with your free download, I can get the story to number 1 before this weekend’s convention appearance (news on that below). If you have an Amazon account, please consider helping me reach this goal. It would be nice to have something to brag about at the convention other than the fact I can fit 42 Lego figures in my beard without them falling out.

!!!UPDATE!!!

After only two hours, this is the new ranking

Thank you so much! We are now incredibly close to the number 1 spot in not just one, but three categories! Since this story is from WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? my hope is that new people see it on Amazon’s top page, and that it helps bring new people to WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? which in turn will mean WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? gets more pre-orders (we’re on ten at the moment).

My Sci-Fi Seminar

I’ve always enjoyed teaching. I got accepted onto a few courses in 2018, but had to drop out of the one I picked to look after family. Anyway, I like teaching, I did it for a bit at Edge Hill University in 2017, both as a student assistant for my Digital Aventure Games tutor, and for my Writer’s And Poetics society, which I founded in 2014. It was the uni’s only academic society at the time, and I created presentations and writing tasks for each weekly seminar until I graduated. We covered everything from disability representation to the paranormal. We even put out an anthology, which I was told was functionally impossible with eleven editors. It went well. I decided to put new and experienced artists and writers side by side, breaking down the barriers usually present in publishing as far back as 2015. Looking back, that was the true spiritual origin point of Halfplanet Press.

We watched The Dead Poets Society at the start of each year.

I also got my students to go outside and bring bits of nature into the classroom. I did not tell them why. When they returned, I got them to write about those things. Hayden told me his poem about a branch was one of the most profound things he had written, and I knew this would happen.

Because you cannot find the profound on purpose. You must simply cast a wide net with your mind, and hope you catch some profound as you journey through the ocean of something or something you get the idea.

It cannot be forced.

It can only be captured as it passes overhead like a bat in the night.

Which brings me to my upcoming lecture.

I am going to be at Manchester Geek Fayre this weekend (14th and 15th December 2024) and if you’re around, it would be good to see you.

I will be borrowing bits from my standup set about Time Travel (first written for Bright Club), and mixing that together with my Creative Writing material, to teach people about why time travel has transcended all genres of fiction, and become something bigger than the genre it was born in.

Why is time travel so important to literature, and how can you use it in your story, even if time travel isn’t allowed in your story’s physics?

You’ll find out in the lecture.

It’s going to be weird.

Be there if you can.

If you can’t make it and feel you’re missing out on convention book deals, don’t worry, most of the deals will apply to online books too.

More news on that on Saturday morning.

I am really hoping enough people grab ONCE THERE WERE OTHERS whilst it is free, to push it into the number 1 slot on Amazon. That would be a tremendous boost to my visibility, and would help me get closer to being a self-sufficient author.

Because between me and you, I want more time to write.

I have so many ideas, so little time.

If only there were a machine for that…

Once There Were Others - Amazon

Thanks again!

Spoilers

Here are my business cards for the convention. They arrive tomorrow. They link off to linktr.ee/phillipcarter and to this newsletter, as those are both the nucleus of all my writing adventures.

This British writer would like to share a sci-fi story and some music with you.

The music

The story

This is one of my favourite stories from Who Built The Humans? The full novella is 39,000 words, making up about a third of the wordcount of the book. I often wish I’d published Lucy’s universe as its own short paperback, and now I have those 100 ISBNs, I might. Between you and me, this novella has some strange links to the upcoming Earthloop Trilogy, that four-book time travel adventure I’ve been chiselling away at.

But here, on its own, is a scene which shows humans and aliens and advanced holographic beings getting along and going on an adventure to find home.

The pilgrimage

△ LUCY’S UNIVERSE △

As was often the custom in immortal communities, Varda was not born, but built. Her internal organs were a work of art, her brain and heart designed to keep going even in the endless emptiness of space. Her skull was an impenetrable fortress, her memories and personality kept inside crystal drives hidden behind intelligent locks. Others carried around spare bodies, but people like Varda never needed to. Hers was so perfect that if she wanted to, she could climb outside naked to perform maintenance on the ship, but she never did.

Her co-pilot, Orbarop, was an Ooblan, an arthropod species that closely resembled the early Earth’s isopods and trilobites. His body was a brown mass of twitching limbs, his shell a pearlescent suit of armour. At any sign of danger he could shut down, going into deep sleep inside his own inbuilt cryogenic chamber. His shell would collect itself into a ball and weld itself shut, nanomachines under his skin poking out only to entomb themselves completely for however many centuries he needed to pass. Because of this his bulbous natural eyes had hardened, the wiring moving itself to the underside of his shell. Here his mouth and new eyes lay at the same height as he towered above Varda, his arching body presenting his face at an angle that made it almost look human. His mouth was a wide crescent of flesh that rarely opened except to project his voice when shouting, his gills trailing down to what might have been his waist. He too could operate perfectly in the cold vacuum of space, but he also never needed to.

The ship was shaped like a sea urchin and draped in a sentient algae that gave it a dark green and chrome shimmer. Each spine on the ship had its own set of sensory equipment, as well as advanced propulsion funnels that could drastically alter trajectory if it ever needed to. Each funnel was filled with potential energy waiting to be spent, and most would never need to be used in the ship’s long lifetime. The longest of these spines was close to a kilometre in length. It was twice as long as the rest and formed the nose of the ship. It was here that Varda and Orbarop rested, and where they would traditionally meet with the ship’s avatar.

The obliteration field was long behind them now, as much a rumour as the dead planet they were chasing. Earth, the origin of Varda’s species, was as much a legend as the afterlife machines that had been left to die there.

“How long?” Orbarop asked. He spoke in a low rumbling growl, like the hoot of an owl slowed down to half its normal pace. Varda had already attuned her hearing to Orbarop’s low pitch, and her evolved mind had no trouble separating the countless layered tones and interpreting them. She turned her chair to face Orbarop, finding that he was looming above her again. From the base of his antennae were hung several human bracelets, gifts from his travels. Varda recognised the jade carvings of the seven-sun planet, a perpetually illuminated world that orbited seven stars at once. It was where her parents were built, where she had met Orbarop, where they were married.

“Five more millennia,” She spoke softly. Her lips were a shining obsidian, her eyes like orange jewels. Her skin was the darkest of blues, almost black, and adorned with golden tattoos that represented the many star systems she had visited with Orbarop. They appeared to be etched into her skin, and sometimes Orbarop thought their shape changed with her mood.

“I love you,” The Ooblan growled.

“Love you too,” Varda replied. Orbarop curled his mandibles into his version of a smile, making her laugh, then scuttled away into a grey corridor behind the cockpit. These long sleeps had become routine now, and the periods of wakefulness existed only as an echo of old human traditions. In ancient times coldbeds used to be the primary method of long sleep, requiring human maintenance and attention every few decades. Now the machines could manage it all themselves. They rarely even spoke to their pilots or passengers, each living in their own private pocket of the universe, each existing in perfect harmony. Some ships even decided where to go, with their passengers appearing mid-journey if they liked the trajectory. It was akin to a symbiotic relationship, where the humans and the Ooblan were alien pets to the spacecraft. The spacecraft gave the passengers a journey, and in return the passengers gave the spacecraft their sleeping minds to explore. In this way many spaceships knew what it felt like to fall in love, and many Ooblan and humans knew what it felt like to skim fuel from the atmosphere of a burning planet.

Varda spent a few customary minutes checking on the ship before returning to the sleeping chamber with Orbarop. They were dreaming for three centuries before the ship spoke again.

“Ooblan,” the ship said.

“What is it?” Orbarop asked, swimming with his golden children. The dream children clattered their little pseudo-hands on his shell, asking why there was a ghost in the river. They were not afraid, and tried to splash the whirling entity with water. The avatar changed its shape and became solid. He was an ancient human male now, draped in a flowing orange cape. His angelic presence seemed only to enhance the beauty of the dream.

“Varda is crying,” Ship said, playfully splashing water back at the dream children.

Orbarop was already aware that Varda was on the outside universe, as she never strayed far from his side in either reality. But he was not aware she was sad, and this was normally something he noticed regardless of what dimension he was in. Varda’s subconscious was typically human, and would often rain its feelings onto the dream world. Yet the world around Orbarop was sunny and pleasant. There was no sadness to be seen.

“Has she disconnected?” Orbarop asked.

“No.”

“Is she in pain?”

“I think she is happy,” The ship said. He walked out of the river and looked around, inspecting the new leaves Varda had invented in a previous dream session. Orbarop was confused.

“Look after the children for me,” he said. He curled up into a ball and fell through the ground, appearing once again inside the ship. Quickly he unfurled and scuttled across the bridge to find Varda weeping in the cockpit. Ahead of them was a cluster of shattered starships.

“What is wrong?” the Ooblan asked.

“Nothing. Sorry, did I wake you?” Varda replied.

“The children will wait. If nothing is wrong, then why are you crying?” Orbarop asked. Varda almost laughed, then pointed to the window.

“I’m happy. It’s here. And it’s beautiful,” she wept. She tilted the ship to view more of the wreckage looming ahead of them. It was arranged in a similar shape to their ship, a central mess of metal and dust surrounded by outcrops of ships of all kinds, stretching out like an explosion. They didn’t appear to be facing anywhere in particular, having been dented and jostled by countless impacts with each other and scavenger ships over the long centuries.

“The cluster. It’s here,” Varda said. Orbarop leaned in beside her and looked out to the endless mess of starships.

“Your theory is correct Varda,” Ship said. “Seventy three percent are aiming outward from a central point,” The words filled Varda with hope.

“That means I was right and the storytellers were wrong. There wasn’t a treasure here, not the type they spoke of anyway. The cluster is a portal. The ships didn’t come to this place to find something, they came from here, from the centre!” Varda announced. She took the manual controls and began driving the ship inward, deftly avoiding the ruined starships all around them as the cluster became denser.

“But why are they destroyed?” Orbarop asked.

“The last of the travellers ran out of fuel here. The portal was their final chance. That’s why we will find no bodies. All the emergency pods will have been launched, and I imagine some attempts were made to rebuild a decently sized ship from the combined wreckage of the larger ships. They weren’t designed to survive timelane travel. If Ship does a scan of any craft we pass, he will find that there were humans here, once, but that no bodies remain,” Varda explained.

Ship appeared in his orange robe as a hologram behind Orbarop. He nodded. “No bodies,” he said. Varda was right. Her ancestors had once narrowly escaped this place, leaving their ships behind in a calculated escape plan. The progenitors of the new humanity.

“Time worm could have got them,” Orbarop grumbled, laughing as he spoke. He knew Varda had no space in her mind for those ancient Ooblan myths.

“Or perhaps they saw us coming, had heard about your sense of humour and left,” Varda replied. Ship stood stoic behind them both, taking in the sights as they neared the centre of the cluster. He frowned, holding his perfect angular jaw as he thought of something. This was a purely social act, as whatever he was pretending to be thinking about had already been calculated. Similarly, whatever question he was about to ask had already been answered. He knew with unshaking certainty that Varda would say yes, but his scientist’s mind wanted to ask just to be sure.

“Can I assimilate the basic minds of these old ships into my own?” Ship asked.

“Absolutely,” Varda replied. Almost before the word had finished leaving her lips Ship had absorbed the surrounding crowds of technology.

“Done,” he said.

“Anything interesting?” Varda asked.

“Yes. Your genetic ancestors originated on a Holtz class star cruiser. This was the first human ship found to be capable of the journey through the rift,” Ship said.

“Trading vessel?”

“The finest.”

“Anything else?” Orbarop asked. Ship knew what he meant and searched for more vessels as they navigated the dense debris field.

“No Ooblan signature here. The origins of your species remain as mysterious as ever, my friend,” Ship began. “The humans were initially encountered by Atanattat technology on this side of the cosmos. It would seem that the timelane that the Atanattat used to enter this region of spacetime is the same one that brought the humans here. Perhaps this is evidence they are not from a higher reality as myth suggests, but merely another time.”

“Another entry for your library,” Varda said.

“I should hope more answers lie at the other end of the tunnel,” Ship answered. His cape flowed in the same imaginary breeze he had brought with him from the sleep world.

“Shall I pause the children?” Ship asked.

“Yes please,” Varda and Orbarop said in unison. Inside the dream world the golden hybrid children grew sleepy and still, hibernating until their parents would visit again. Ship concentrated, and the metal surrounding the cockpit became like thin quartz, a cracked glassy surface with only the residual brownish intrusions of circuits becoming visible from certain angles. Varda reached to where she knew the scanner button was. Pressing it, she initiated the scan of the wormhole ahead of them. A single glistening probe erupted from somewhere beneath the cockpit, spiralling madly towards the wormhole. As it flew its spire-shaped body twisted, mapping its surroundings. Then it was gone. There was a minute or two of silence, and then Ship spoke again.

“The probe says our ship will survive the journey,” he said.

“Chances?” Orbarop asked.

“98% safety,”

“But is Earth on the other side?” Varda asked.

“Of course,” Ship replied as if it meant nothing. Varda looked out through the transparent cockpit at the temporal storm ahead of them, imagining Earth. Outside there were waves of surreal movement, ships disappearing and reappearing, as if time itself was being torn apart. She pressed her hands against the glass, the golden carvings shining under starlight.

“And does this lead to the past?” Orbarop asked.

“The rift is predominantly spatial. There is a mere five hundred year discrepancy,” Ship said.

“Nothing compared to our pilgrimage here,” Varda said.

“Exactly,” Ship replied. “It is negligible, but it does mean that the Earth Varda’s ancestors left behind will likely have changed over the millennia. You may not be returning to the Earth of legend, but another world entirely,” Ship explained.

“That doesn’t matter,” Varda said. “At least it’s still there.”

The ship’s long nose punctured the centre of the wormhole, the rest following shortly after.

“There is wreckage. I will resume control,” Ship said. As they entered the time tunnel Orbarop curled into a ball, his body clattering against the back of the cockpit. Varda laughed, but she too was afraid. She thought about the children in their interior universe, thought of casting her mind there but didn’t. She couldn’t miss this. She had to see the ship emerge into human territory.

Ship piloted himself around and through the wreckage of a thousand more starships. He kept close to the centre of the time tunnel, scanning the machines scraping against the glistening edges, and wondered what had kept it open all this time. Then, before he could answer his question, the tunnel frayed and dissolved before him.

“We are off course,” Ship said stoically. Varda could tell by the erratic movement of the stars outside that they were no longer travelling, instead Ship was turning on his axis, looking around desperately. In these frantic movements she felt a sign of fear, something she imagined Ship had learned from frequent trips into her subconscious.

“I thought you said ninety eight percent,” Varda said.

“I survived, didn’t I?” Ship replied sarcastically, his voice tainted with nervousness.

“Relax, it’s not like we’re at the edges of time,” Varda said. She knew the ships hated the nonsense that formed the outer shell of the universe, and had hoped the reference to it might distract him. The incalculable mess they had left behind held no answers that a Ship’s brain could compute, and nothing for Varda and Orbarop either.

“It is not that. I am just taking it all in,” Ship explained.

“Taking what in?” Varda asked. She turned on her chair to face Ship’s avatar as he sat on Orbarop’s still spherical body. Ship was looking right through her, his countless minds elsewhere.

“So many stars,” he said. Varda could almost see the beginnings of tears below his avatar’s eyes.

Beneath Ship’s avatar the spherical form of Orbarop started to move again.

“It was always this way, in our legend,” Orbarop growled. He finally unfurled himself, snapping back open with enough force to throw Ship’s avatar into a supporting beam on one end of the cockpit. He shattered and flowed around it, congealing elsewhere and brushing himself down, another pointless mimicry that he employed simply to appear more human.

“I know the stories. The time worm that ate the star sailor. When he cut his way out of its stomach the stars had died, and he had sailed to the universe’s edge. That is where he took his children, who became the first Ooblan, the children of the starless edges of reality,” Varda replied. Orbarop curled his mandibles into his signature smile, holding her shoulders and looking out at the universe ahead.

“You do listen,” he said.

“I have located Earth,” Ship interrupted.

The ship took another century to reach Earth, during which Varda and Orbarop slept. They shared only one brief dream with their children in the sleep world, during which they tried to explain to them what they were planning to do. The children, being virtual themselves, grasped the concept easily, but the brightest of them was sceptical.

The planet was not as Varda’s ancestors had described it. The barren world was green again, greener than it had ever been, and its continents had been split into distinct zones in which extinct species roamed and endless paths snaked from place to place. Ancient monuments had been unearthed, thousands of which did not appear on any of the records that Ship had acquired from the ruins in the wormhole cluster. It was like the planet had been reborn.

“There is intelligence,” Ship said as Varda woke up. He waited until Varda and Orbarop had taken it all in before telling them what he meant.

“An archive machine, Enuwha, has befriended Lucy,” Ship clarified.

“She’s real? And still alive!?” Varda exclaimed.

“Archive machines… like the ones near the edges of time?” Orbarop thought aloud. Ship nodded at both statements, but stopped Varda from pushing the ship closer to the planet.

“She cannot see us now,” he explained.

“Why not?” Orbarop asked. He pushed Ship’s avatar aside, his bracelets clattering atop his head, and pressed the manual thrust. Nothing happened.

“Lucy has humans,” Ship explained. Varda and Orbarop stopped, both turning to give Ship their full attention.

“But all the humans left,” Varda said.

“She made new humans,” Ship said. “I have sent ghost probes to the surface. They tell me that Lucy was emptied of human memories and left behind. But Enuwha had retained humans that were thought to be lost. Those were the progenitors to the new race.”

“And they walk the Earth?” Varda asked. Ship shrugged as if to almost agree, waiting before speaking again, as if he was thinking at a biological pace.

“Only when they die. Lucy and the archive machine reversed the order of things. She uses her simulation as the living world, and the real world as the afterlife. That way the humans will not escape her.”

Varda contemplated this for a minute, thought about the simulated afterlife in human mythology, how some had proposed they were still living inside it, that the edge of space was really the edge of Lucy’s imagination.

“And what happens if humans try to escape, and how long was this Enuwha under Earth’s surface?” Orbarop asked. Before he could answer Ship received a message from another vessel waiting in the darkness.

“Atanattat cruiser requesting communication,” Ship said before dissolving his avatar. Golden sparks and embers died away where he was stood seconds before. Varda looked up at Orbarop as he let out a nervous wheeze from somewhere under his plated head. Ship’s emotionless and sudden announcement had only made the situation more surreal. Orbarop hesitated as he thought about accepting the request. Varda tapped him on the shoulder and smiled uncomfortably.

“Do it,” she said.

Orbarop accepted the alien request with all the nervousness of someone making first contact. The Atanattat were legends, something he had only heard of in stories, something he was quietly afraid of.

The Atanattat ship was a heavily corroded tetrahedron, each triangular side composed of mangled pipelines, scars and craters. It looked as if it had been hollowed out of some other, larger vessel, or perhaps patched together from the ruins of molten starships. Each side seemed to be welded to the rest with immense lines of molten metal. It reminded Orbarop of the lava flows of his home world.

The thing lumbered lazily between Mars and Earth, jittering every now and again as its internal thrusters misfired. Something about it made Varda want to run away. Even Ship’s usually stoic avatar looked uncomfortable as he stood at the old and disused docks, the three of them waiting for the slow visitor to land.

The ship was much smaller than theirs. It reminded Orbarop of a virus entering a body, and deep down he worried the Atanattat would not be friendly. Then the Atanattat manifested beside them, making the short subspace leap between the interior of his ship and the interior of theirs. His body was red and brown, spindly and sharp. He had mandibles much like Orbarop, but the bipedal gait of a human despite having six legs. He moved as if his body was two or three human bodies overlapped, and even his hands were clasped together into a rough approximation of something humanoid. Ship presumed this must have been his attempt to seem similar to the predominant forms on the ship.

The Atanattat towered above the three, his body atrophied and weak, shaking under its own weight. It wasn’t long before Ship called for a portion of the floor to rise to meet the alien’s body, helping him down into a seated position.

“Your kind knew of Lucy, and you never told us she was real?” Varda asked. She was shaking, though Orbarop did not know why. The spiderlike being above her leaned down, looking into her memories.

“You know of more? I thought I was the last,” He said.

“There were seven, in official records. They rescued the humans on the other end of the time stream. Why didn’t you go through?” Varda replied.

“His ship would melt,” Ship said. The Atanattat nodded.

“There were three on this side. Myself and two brothers.”

“What are your names?” Orbarop asked.

“I am Sarbrox. My brothers were Scohhrin and Lahkx. Both died on impact with this reality. I carry their bodies in my ship.”

“I am sorry,” Orbarop said. He took a bracelet off one of his antennae and offered it to Sarbrox, who slowly took it in his long fingers.

“What is this?” Sarbrox asked.

“A gift of friendship and condolence,” Orbarop said. Varda looked at the Atanattat as he spun the bracelet between his fingers.

“It is from an ocean world,” Varda said, remembering the day she bought it.

“Do you like it?” Orbarop asked.

“I like it very much,” Sarbrox replied, fitting the bracelet over one of his immense fingers and smiling.

“So it is true, the Atanattat are from a higher realm?” Ship asked.

“That is what our machines tell us. All we remember is falling,” Sarbrox said.

END

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Hello everyone,

Just wanted to keep you up to date.

Who Killed The Humans? is going quite well, albeit slower than I had wanted.

Working in the shadow of Who Built The Humans? (and at that same time, publishing a new edition of WBTH so I can get it into stores, and then doing all the distribution and admin to get it stocked physically in B&N and Waterstones, and then finding podcast people to talk about it and sort out conventions and interviews) has been an adventure in itself. It’s not easy for small presses to get through those big shiny doors, so I figured I’d give it a go before my book comes out this time, rather than after.

I have a few email addresses for important people and I am going to try to set up an event or two in Manchester (UK) as a book launch. If I can’t get a bookstore, I know a Sci-Fi bar that will definitely say yes.

How it’s going.

The crystalline shape of WKTH is growing quite nicely, and I think I am on track for the release date of 3 Feb 2025.

That is 134 days away, at the time of this email (22/09/2024).

Before then, I want to do things a little differently.

What the series is about.

The Who Built The Humans? series is a comedic and existential series of stories, rant-poems, and novellas which pose new answers to the big questions that form the titles of each book. Who Built The Humans? It could have been alien archaeologists creating world-dreams for research, or we could be a nightmare a robot is having, or we could be a vanity project by a very bored teenaged God, something to impress that girl he likes.

We could also be a genetic weapon, a vessel for demons to travel around in, or punching bags for sentient crystals.

All of these conclusions are true. All of them are in the series.

Why be normal?

In publishing, one of the secret goals nobody talks about is normalcy. You are supposed to come up with ‘comps’, lists of other books your book is like. Usually these have to be recent, so you can impress publishers and agents by proving you read stuff. You’ve got to stand out, but not too much. Got to be new, but not too new. They want another version of that thing that sold last week, so if you’re skipping a few generations in the evolution of literature (I myself am becoming a crab that can eat time (another story in WBTH)) then you might struggle to be recognised, not just understood.

So I went about doing it myself.

The goal.

With Who Built The Humans? my goal was deliberately weird. I wanted to create a massive 'best-of' collection for a dead sci-fi comedian who was not actually dead. The idea was that on the surface the book would look like a collection of someone's best stories, collected together here only because they were of similar quality. But inside it would be a different beast, a complex network of eleven intersecting universes, each of which was written specifically for that book, so that they clicked together perfectly, harmonising like the ingredients in a cockail that you could pour into your skull vent, if you had one of those, which you probably don't.

It was a strange idea, one which several smart friends told me I could make more money from if I split it into multiple books (and I since have, making the vintage author’s journey backwards like the time traveller I am). But I had a grand vision for WBTH. I wanted a book that was not just fun, but valuable.

I wanted to make Science Fiction more accessible.

• To people with ADHD, who might sometimes get lost in the meandering prose of other books

• To people on train journeys, who, after reaching their destination, found themselves slipping away from the books they had to put down

• To people with lives like yours, lives which don’t give you days upon days to pore through a dense Science Fiction text

The solution to these issues, for me in 2020, seemed pretty simple.

I would write a book that was many books and one book at once.

It would make sense no matter which way you read its components.

And, if you are one of the lucky people who find the time to read it front-to-back, those eleven universes would coalesce into a bigger, more beautiful, more hilarious story.

Because they talk to each other. As you consider hopping from one cosmos to the next, you might find the beginning of one story directly satirises the ending of another. Characters and concepts sneak between the pages, making re-reads of Who Built The Humans? as rewarding as re-playing your favourite video game.

ADHD-friendly Science Fiction.

This attention to value in literature is what I think sets me apart from a lot of the industry at present. I am not interested at all in cheap thrills. I know you’re smart, you’re probably smarter than me, and my books should respect that.

They should also accomodate for the lifestyles of modern readers. Sometimes at events people almost apologise for not having much time to read the book they just bought from me. I don’t mind (you can always use your psychic abilities to see how happy future you is, and write a review on their behalf). But jokes aside, most people do struggle to put time aside for writing, and I considered that when making these books.

Give me more attention please, said the shiny rectangle of doom.

I don’t see other writers as competition. We all have our audiences, and often those audiences overlap. We are in this together.

Who I see as competition is Netflix, video games, dating apps, eBay, all those other things you could be doing in your house whilst your bookshelf gathers dust.

Books, I think, could be more fun. Some of them are quite dry, and these newer forms of entertainment are pretty entertaining. Some people prefer movies to books, and I wanted to write a book that might feel like a movie. The WHO BUILT THE HUMANS series is designed to feel a bit like you’re watching a handful of shows simultaneously, as many of you probably do.

I know I do.

So where am I going with this?

Who Built The Humans? was a new type of book. I invented it during 2020, and I called it the NOVELTHOLOGY. It is a book which is simultaneously simple and complicated, a machinery of literature which can creak and clank and shift and shuffle to adapt to your specific circumstances.

Ten minute train ride? Read one of the silly Sci-Fi poems.

Three hours in the bath? Here, I brought you an existential crisis.

The concept was inspired by the ‘tracks’ I built into experimental poetry in 2015 with the invention of the COLLAPSOR, which I will get into another time.

All you need to know is that under the sleek and shiny surface, the Who Built The Humans? series is designed so that every reader’s experience of it is different.

Read a bit before it comes out.

I want a similar feeling for Who Killed The Humans? but with a bit more fanfare upon its release. For that reason, I am selecting some stories that are going into the book and releasing them once they are done, before the full book comes out.

Hologram Kebab was one such story. It appears in the new edition of WBTH as a teaser story (alongside the new afterword), will be in WKTH, and was published on its own on Amazon in April 2024. It’s since enjoyed a few moments in the top 10 sci-fi comedies.

The next story to emerge from WKTH will be Mycelial, a Sci-Fi horror I wrote last year.

You might remember an early draft from my Substack. The story follows a mycelial network that develops sentience and decides to take over the universe. Standard Phillip Carter stuff. It was my most popular post, came second place in a writing contest (the name of which I forget) and then got picked up by Cinnabar Moth press for one of their brilliant anthologies.

My exclusivity agreement with them ran out just over a month ago, so you can expect Mycelial to appear again soon.

Until then, it would be fantastic if you checked out WBTH or WKTH. At this point, the WKTH pre-orders on Amazon are hugely important to boosting the book’s popularity.

On Amazon, you should only ever be charged the cheapest price a few days before release. That means if I reduce the price after you order it, you’ll be charged the lower price.

Paperbacks are also good. The newer editions’ covers fit together.

My books

(link at bottom of this email).

WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?

At the time of writing, I am 75,000 words into the book (discounting the few thousand words I actively dislike, and glare at whenever I open the computer).

I have refined and altered the formula that proved successful with Who Built The Humans?, building on the concept of a choose-your-own-adventure and trimming it back. The goal here is to make the multiverse feel more tangible, more simple, and in that simplicity allow the complexity of the stories to thrive.

With that in mind, the basic premise for WKTH is that for some of the stories, you are presented with a 'what if?' scenario first. Then you choose whether to read the sci-fi answer, or the comedy answer. I'm not doing this with every premise as I want to surprise you when you're reading the book.

Lax Morales

A few of you (hi, Chloe!) have asked if Lax Morales is returning in this book. For those who don't know, Lax Morales is a shapeshifting alien who makes his home on Earth after crash-landing here in the 1950s. He's also hunting down a time machine, and being hunted in turn by Fixer, a reptilian alien who remembers attending Lax's funeral. It gets complicated. He showed up in WBTH in the Furukawa universe, which is now being turned into three time travel novels with THE EARTHLOOP TRILOGY. His two brothers also showed up in WBTH, in different universes, implying something multidimensional happened during his crash, splitting their ship down three time streams.

So, to answer your question. Yes, he is returning.

Publishing against the flow of time.

In WBTH, there were some smaller universes which I really wished had a bigger potential to find an audience. So, I waited two or three years and reprinted them as standalone pieces. It is a collection, after all.

This was the plan all along: To have a 'best-of' collection for a dead sci-fi writer who was not yet dead, something that honoured the classics whilst punching holes in the weirdness of the (eternal) present state of things.

For WKTH, one or two stories will be made available elsewhere as a way for me to advertise the collection. Hologram Kebab, for example, is currently free on Amazon and other retailers.

Back to the WKTH wordcount.

So, as I said up top, 75,000 words in. Not many more than the last update, but I wrote and cut a lot in recurring cycles, getting to a better, punchier story.

My short story THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE clocks in at 16,000 words. That’s probably going to show up in WKTH, if there’s room for it.

Ultimately, that primordial concept for WBTH remains as the DNA for the series.

A 'best-of' collection for a dead writer who isn't yet dead.

The beginning of the end.

I wanted to thank you all for supporting this weird new book. I'm approaching the end of the crowd-funding phase now, and looking to pause certain perks. I'll also be deleting most of the ones which nobody has joined yet, because if nobody wants them they're not useful and would only make producing the book harder. It's more cost-effective for me to produce 5 packs of stickers than 1 pack of stickers, for example.

So the doors are slowly closing.

I know times are hard for everyone, and I know I am not exactly in Brandon Sanderson levels of megafame as an indie author, so I have been relentlessly excited with every single bit of support here so far. I honestly didn't expect this much. Every penny is going into creating this thing.

Thanks again for supporting it!

The end of the beginning.

Once I've worked out how ARCs work, I'll open them for WKTH and let you have a look at some of the stories. I'll keep some secret though, I still want to surprise you with what I've imagined.

End

That’s it for the update. There’s a longer, more detailed version over at the crowdfundr page, and after this little outro (and a picture of a new shirt) there’s a reader poll.

Skulls and jellyfish. Can’t go wrong. The brand is Joe Browns.

About that. My instagram is slowly turning into a standup comedy and fashion page, which feels a lot more naturally than throwing photos of my books at strangers online and hoping they buy them (I also have an instagram for that). I do a lot of stuff. This Substack feels like the nucleus to it all.

And next up, two polls I conducted on instagram recently to work out what everyone there wants from my content.

If I did a livestream (or recorded a youtube chat) here soon, what would you be most interested in seeing and talking about?

Second poll. You can decide what books I talk about next.

I like doing these polls because, even if you’re on emails and can’t comment easily, you should be able to be heard by voting.

As always, thanks for taking part.

Youtube

I’m also on Youtube, sometimes. Below is an example of one which was 90% improv - it’s a 24 minute video about why the new Arts fad of glamorising misery needs to end, and writers need to be encouraged to enjoy their art again.

Example: Earthloop is very difficult to write because I need to know how book three ends before writing book one. I take on difficult projects like this because completing them is rewarding and writing them is like inventing a new type of machine. I find people who say time travel is ‘overdone’ to be boring and unimaginative; there will always be new ways to revisit the past.

WBTH also included time travel, and had the very first chapters of Earthloop included within itself as the Furukawa Universe. With WBTH, I knew I was writing something new and weird, and took the risk that a few years down the line people might email me to tell me they loved how weird and fun it was.

I only had to wait six months after release for that message to arrive.

So, I think taking on difficult artistic projects is worth it. I think if you want to tell a new story, you have to go through the difficult parts.

And those parts should be seen as what they are: fun.

I’m going to treat this video to a proper thumbnail soon, but I do like having videos that make people on Youtube feel like I’m on the 2am bus, yelling into their face about reptilian aliens. I think it suits my brand.

That’s it for today, see you in the next one,

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It’s been too long since my last proper writing post. I’m still amazed everyone liked my brief foray into serious poetry with PUNKS, and I am currently working out how to go about publishing it. I did angle myself toward a serious poetry night, but there was a standup comedy night on at the same time, so I went and told dark jokes instead. I’ve mostly slipped away from the poetry scene now and I’m enjoying life as a comedian, but I do have a pen name (Laurence Carter) who might find himself in serious events every now and again if they’ve got free wine or something.

I was a decently competent poet at uni, having scored 1st class marks for every single poetry assignment through all four years. I was experimental, intelligent, and only near the end did I start making rhyming jokes about paying for my student flat heating bills by flirting with aliens on the phone.

Looking back, the shift to comedy was well overdue.

This long-winded introduction itself is part of the joke. Because the following short story is inspired by those spoken word poets who take so long introducing their work that civilisations rise and fall as they shuffle through their pages. This story takes that concept to its extremes, in my usual style, and slots in quite nicely to the middle of WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? my upcoming collection of dark Sci-Fi comedy stories that changes shape according to your choices.

If you haven’t heard, WKTH is the sequel collection to my debut book WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?, signed copies of which are still available. Both books are collections of mind-bending Sci-Fi and comedy, and you can read them in any order, but there’s a bigger, weirder narrative to unfold if you have both.

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I am sharing this little first draft story here, for free, in the hopes it might convince somebody to support WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? This is one of the tamer stories, where I’ve tried to tell a science-fiction story and a comedy story at the same time, wrapping them around each other.

I like it, but I am still going to polish it a lot before publication.

Okay, that’s enough meandering.

The Poem That Ended The Universe

Barry Binbag banged on about berating the local bards in bars. He skulked up to the stage and ruffled through his pockets for notes, pulling loose a considerable wad of crumpled paperwork.

“This,” he said, “Is my best work yet. And if you’d be so kind, I would like a moment to explain it to you. It shouldn’t take long.”

The audience fell silent. The host mouthed the words ‘ten minutes’ toward Barry, who had a reputation for not understanding the concept of time. Barry nodded and began the short preamble to his poem.

“This is a poem I wrote. Now I didn’t always write poems. Once when I was a baby, I was too young to write, and before then I didn’t even exist. But when I was a baby, I also had quite chubby hands and didn’t know how to control them. I couldn’t hold pens, nor did I have the finger strength required to operate a typewriter. But I did hear poems on the television, and I was introduced to poetry at a young age, when I was quite young, in fact I think I first found poetry when I was about four years old, which is quite young of an age compared to other ages. Other ages are indeed available. Back then I had a cousin who was six, and another who was thirteen. Lots of ages.

Back then when people were four years old, we were asked to go down to the shops to buy cigarettes which was bad but not as bad as being made to operate machinery, I guess. A few of my cousins operated machinery. I am a big fan of machinery. It is nice that things are automated now. There was a factory near my town which was very tall and sometimes its shadow reached all the way to the town hall where my grandmother would sell little cakes. She made them herself in her cottage. The cottage was made of bricks taken from an old farm wall. The farm had fallen into disrepair as the owner had died, and his remaining family was not large enough to maintain it, so they allowed a few hectares to go wild, including the section from which the bricks were taken that built my grandmother’s house. She could see the factory from the cottage. The factory-made garments. It was a very big place. I bought my first paperback book in the library in the village and from the library you can see the factory.

This poem is about the factory and the people who looked at the factory and said, ‘oh look, there’s a factory’ and also, it’s about the people couldn’t see the factory, who would say, ‘oh look, we can’t see the factory because there’s a church in the way’. And it’s also a poem about those who worked at the factory and also those who couldn’t work at the factory because they were disabled, and also those people who worked there once, but became disabled due to an accident and then could not work at the factory any longer. So really this poem is for everyone. It is family friendly too, so I would appreciate it if the children in the audience would stop crying. Thank you.”

Barry finally breathed in.

“As I said I don’t always write poems but this one just came to me suddenly one day after I read a thing about writing poems in the local paper, and I’ve been to a class about writing poems and the class only cost me £699.99 because I had a special discount so I don’t really know where I got the idea from to write a poem but I seem to have written one after my teacher told me to write one at the poetry class where we are meant to write poems. Anyway, this poem is about the factory and also my recent divorce, but the factory is the most important part of the poem,” Barry Binbag explained. He did not elaborate about the divorce, but anyone in the front row could see the pain in his eyes and a crayon drawing of his ex-wife protruding from his pocket. One member of the audience remarked to her girlfriend that the proportions were ridiculous.

At this point Barry had already used up seventy five percent of his allocated time slot for his poem and had not gotten to it yet. He had dragged on his introduction for so long that time itself was beginning to bend and contort around him, like a germophobic businessman whirling around people on the morning train, or a person with good taste deftly avoiding the advances of people who like books recommended by coffee shops. The audience was noticeably older now, and the crying children were now weeping teenagers.

“This is one of my favourite poems,” Barry Binbag said. “It is one of my favourites because it contains a few words that I am quite fond of, in an order which I hope you find pleasing. It took me a long time to rearrange the words and another amount of time to learn words, which I did a lot of in school. My ex-wife used to like my poems before she realised what they were really about. She was nice. She had blonde hair and a very kind face and was adept at sleeping with my friends. She worked in the supermarket and was one of the people who made sure the bread was in the right place. She was a bread arranger. It’s a prestigious job you know. I quite like bread. Does anyone else here like bread?”

At this point the fabric of time had stretched too thin around Barry Binbag, and abysmal creatures from outside of time and space began crawling and groping into the poetry evening, which was now hosted in a crumbling, laser-pocked building that had barely survived several apocalypses. The time creatures were purple and twisted, red eyes glowing with evil light from sunken-back eyeholes. They clawed at the remaining loose souls on Earth as Barry Binbag continued to prattle on about his poem and the factory it was based on.

A short time later the sun expanded and died, the earth was scorched, forgotten, and later rediscovered by a race of hyperintelligent fish who had waited for the right time to visit the solar system, as they didn’t fancy listening to Barry, who by now was a mythical figure all across the galaxy. In fact, certain alien societies used Barry the poet’s boring forcefield as a way to time travel.

Later still the Milky Way galaxy crashed into Andromeda, the glittering tapestry of the night skies was rethreaded, and the universe itself began to grow old. It hurt when the universe sat down, and the universe no longer trusted its own farts. Wrinkles and breakages in spacetime occurred more frequently now, and yet Barry Binbag was still completing the preamble to his poem, even though the audience, and the evolved descendants of the audience, were no longer technically listening because they had long ago transcended the meaning of listening, or something.

Well, one of them was still tuned in. Her name was cube-human 40101428080. She was a glowing cube filled with the combined intellect of her ancestors. She was the chosen one, the young cube-human selected to wait for Barry Binbag to begin his poem. She was only here because eons ago, her human ancestor was too awkward to leave when Barry was banging on about his poem. In the murky and distant past, cube-human 40101428080 could see her ancestor struggling to get out of her chair without disturbing proceedings, contemplating faking an important phone call or illness just to leave. But she never managed.

Cube-human 40101428080 had been here all her life. Her mission was an obligation of social awkwardness that had now extended into cosmic proportions. She was designed to wait here for Barry to begin his poem, for it was thought that his poem would be so profound that it might contain the secrets to the very last unanswered questions in the universe, such as ‘Why do poets take so fucking long introducing their poems?’

Barry Binbag began the next section of his preamble.

“I don’t get poetry these days. People like to throw all these line breaks in, but it just looks broken. There’s no sense to it. It isn’t proper. They put line breaks in where

there shouldn’t be any line

breaks and it doesn’t ma

ke any sense.

but they suppose

it makes their poem look

a bit longer

and then they mention an ex-boyfriend or ex-

girlfriend or whatever else they are into and expect

us to clap when they compare a living human being

to a low-fat yoghurt or a straw

berry

whilst I prefer a more freeform thing me. I also like pies. There was a good pie shop in my local town in the nineteen eighties which I often frequented with my friends. We would go to the pub and then get a pie. It was our social media. I guess you could call it pie book. Hah, hah, hah. It’s a good joke that. Pie book.” Barry laughed alone, but not because most of his audience were now fossils or advanced energy ghosts, but because the joke was shit.

“Anyway this poem is about that chapter in my life and some others, and the factory and my failed marriage. I hope you enjoy hearing it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And I do enjoy writing. It is one of the greatest things you can do if you discount eating cakes, not having a divorce, your kids still speaking to you, going on holiday, a very nice pie, another holiday, finding a nice pair of shoes in the shops, being loved by a beautiful woman like my ex-wife, having a best friend that doesn’t sleep with your ex-wife, and having an ex-wife that doesn’t sleep with your best friend. Anyway where was I? Ah, yes. Writing. The beautiful art of using words in good way so bad way look not good when compare.

I have had such a fascinating life that it would be criminal not to write some of it down. Just think about Pie Book. Hilarious stuff that. I should be a comedian. Anyway I have been writing for a long time now and I love all the poems I have put together. I am pleased that I get to share them with you. Thank you for being here to listen to my poems. I hope you like my poems,” Barry Binbag said.

At this point even cube-human 40101428080 was beginning to feel the strain of time. Even though she was immortal, she could feel parts of herself peeling away like heavy makeup in a rainstorm. She no longer cared about the mystery of Barry Binbag and how he managed to outlive the human species. All she cared about was finding a way out of this poetry recital. She looked to the ancient fire exit, still perfectly preserved, and considered sabotaging some of her circuits to start a fire that would probably kill her. She then turned back to Barry Binbag. He had finally flattened out the crumpled mass of paper and put his glasses on. He was about to read. Cube-human 40101428080 was astonished. Out of countless silent watchers she would be the one to witness the fabled poem. She could hardly contain her excitement. This would be the last poetry recital in history, as the universe was about to end.

Barry Binbag breathed in and sighed. Outside the arts bar the universe ended, rogue pockets of spacetime breaking off and drifting away like unlikely couples at the ends of house parties, some becoming their own writhing, pulsing cosmoses. If Barry could see this cosmic dance, he would no doubt have something to say about his ex-wife. But he wasn’t looking, he was carefully admiring the piece of paper. It was time.

Barry finally looked up from his paper, seeing cube-human 40101428080 and also those time demons from earlier which my editor told me I should have brought up again for consistency. For narrative reasons, Barry was unperturbed. What perturbed him instead was the paper in his hands. He checked it again and began.

“Milk, eggs

and something else scribbled.”

One of the time demons clapped its hands. This was the best piece of poetry it had ever heard.

But there was silence on the stage.

“I’m so sorry,” Barry Binbag said. “This is a shopping receipt.”

Cube-human 40101428080 had had enough of being alive. She initiated her self-destruct sequence, detonating her cubic form, obliterating Barry, and the time demons. Unbeknownst to her because she was dead now, the explosion reacted violently with the stretched and tormented spacetime around Barry Binbag, imploding the broken universe and starting it again. Barry and Cube-human 40101428080 would be reborn, their matter seeding the procedural generation of the next hellish universe.

This time a new Barry Binbag would walk onto a new stage in a new bar in a new universe. Unbeknownst to him, Cube-human 40101428080 had survived this apocalypse, crawling out of the fires of the last universe to intervene in this one.

This time Barry would pull out a piece of paper and open his mouth for the preamble, but at that precise moment his head would be obliterated by a time travelling cube. As this was an arts bar, nobody in the audience would question this occurrence, believing it to be some artistic statement, which perhaps it was, and business would go on as usual. Teenagers with bad haircuts would order their drinks, their hair covered in bits of Barry Binbag. None of them would know the fate they had been spared from.

Until Sandra Saltlick clambered up onto the stage.

You can check out WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and my other books, by clicking the link below or in my email footer, which explains it a bit more.

My books

See you in the next one!

Beep Beep.

Your starship wakes you up… But it isn’t speaking in its usual voice…

“It’s been a long while, captain.

Let’s test your memory.

Do you remember this banner?”

“I… I mean… Phillip used it to signal something ahead of time. It’s nearly here… Two weeks.”

“Two… weeks…”

“TWWWWOOOOOO, WEEEEEKS.”

The talking stops. You look outside the starship window, seeing my giant floating head. This isn’t too unusual, it happens at least once a week. But then, my head flips open, revealing the Numan inside (New Human, not to be confused with Gary Numan). It’s a gleaming chrome robot with copper eyes that stare through you, stare directly into some weird, parallel reality.

Before you have time to react, an announcement is beamed forth from the holoprojectors behind my eyes. Eight digits rotate around a central point.

0 9 0 8 2 0 2 3

What could it mean?

Well. I’ll make it easy for you. 09/08/2023 is my 31st birthday.

And I am celebrating in a way only I would celebrate:

I am bringing out new books.

Yes, plural.

Book 1

WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?

DELUXE EDITION HARDBACK

It took a while to find the perfect printer, but I managed. This luxurious hardback will contain exclusive bonus stories, extra content, chapter headings for each main setting and character created out of Lego (in partnership with my alter ego Grumblebricks), and a brick-built (yes, seriously) map of the entire multiverse from the Fragmented Multiverse series. Including new locations.

I’m currently working on other things to sneak into it as well.

The deluxe edition WBTH hardback will launch on Crowdfundr on 09.08.2023 and any orders for it will automatically be added to the total goal for another, bigger project.

Can you guess what that project is?

Book 2

WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? TWO

- Hologram Kebabs and Hungry Horses

Now, I’m not settled on the subtitle, but there are hologram kebabs and hungry horses, so it gives people a good sense of the tone.

Coming out in Hardback, then eBook, and hopefully Audiobook, this sequel/prequel/everythingquel to WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? somehow manages to be more strange. It grabs the existing formula I invented, adds some shiny things, mixes it with some temporal anomalies, rattles the mixture, throws it in the air like a fancy cockail, and then brings it back down to Earth, where you can experience it. If you thought WBTH1 was weird, prepare yourself.

Cyrstal Susan returns, as does Barry Binbag, who was definitely in the first one.

Those strange fellows called Humans (who I invented) are bungling and scrambling and slumping their way through the pages of another epic tome. And, if you’ve been here on my Substack for a while, you’ve already seen glimpses of their adventure, for WBTH2’s top secret pen name was once Hologram Kebab, named after its first story.

I am already 60% through the writing and the editing of it. I can confirm that it is deranged. How deranged, you ask?

THE STORIES SO FAR

• A poem so boring that the narrator couldn’t allow it to be in the book, and instead just narrates how many people die during its debut appearance at a poetry recital, which goes on for so long that the universe ends. The story then follows what happens after the universe ends, and the kinds of characters who survive the poetry-death of all time and space

• A magical horse that shits out scarves with government secrets knitted into them, as well as worrying cries for help

• Self-replicating machines having an identity crisis

• Talking mushrooms, and not the ones from Mycelial (but those too)

• A secret society of clockwork conspirators

• A surprise appearance from my pen name, the erotic wizard genius ROD GRASPER, who will assail your mind with stories about cattle mutilation

• A time travelling cow (not related to the above story, honestly)

• A time travelling tardigrade

• A time travelling God, the God you met in WBTH1. Yeah, he survived the explosion, sort of, but not really. You’ll see

• A parody of 1950s Sci-Fi called THE EVIL WILLY FROM OUTER SPACE which is exactly what it sounds like it is

• A magical adventure to find a well-endowed elf princess called Buxomina, who sadly died long before the narrator got the job to narrate the story about her failed rescue

• A story about a dimension-hopping kitten that isn’t funny, but actually one of my most emotional stories. It wouldn’t be a WBTH if it didn’t suddenly surprise you by being quite clever in between jokes

• An action story with so much action, the book might rattle itself out of your hands and explode into glitter or something

• A short story about a tribe of gorillas outsmarting aliens

But that’s not all. Since publishing the original WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? in 2020, a small crowd of people have been asking me ‘what happens next’ for various universes. Well, the answer is not far away. WBTH2 also includes:

• A sequel to the ARCHITECTS universe from WBTH

• A side story in the FURUKAWA universe (tie-in with EARTHLOOP)

• A side story from the STEPHANIE universe

In the run-up to WBTH2 I will be releasing the smaller SEVEN STORIES SERIES book by book, to keep you all entertained whilst I do the chiselling. Each of these will contain one story that will later show up in WBTH2, as a way to advertise the epic collection to new readers. These three stories will take on a new shape in WBTH2, as they will be framed by (and will interact with) the other stories in the collection.

As it stands, I am 63,000 words in.

THAT’S STILL NOT ALL

And there’s a change to the formula. WBTH2 will still be navigable in almost any order, but on top of that, you’ll be able to pick the tone of the next story you read.

I will propose an idea, such as ‘what if mushrooms were sentient?’ and you, dear reader, get to pick whether to read a silly or serious response to the idea.

It’s bold. It’s weird. It’s never been done before.

Will it work? My top secret group of seven beta readers says yes.

You can be added to that group soon, if you join the upcoming pre-order campaign. Launching, predictably, on the 9th of August, alongside the WBTH1 special edition hardback, on Crowdfundr.

Both books will have an audiobook tier as well. Audiobooks aren’t easy to make, so I don’t know if I’ll reach the goal for them, but I hope I do! I’ve already had about 40 hours of practice in my home studio.

Things you’ll find on the tiers:

• eBook

• Hardback

• Audiobook

And if you’re more into paperbacks, there will be an additional tier for a signed copy of WBTH1, in case you’ve not already got it. All purchases will be added to the total for WBTH2, even if they’re off-site. So, if you’re impatient, you can get one now by clicking the picture here.

I’ve restocked!

(If you know a cheaper postal service, let me know)

WBTH2, the WBTH1 DELUXE HARDBACK, and WBTH1 signed paperback will all collect their funds together into a single crowdfunding pool that will create WBTH2. If that pool reaches a certain depth, I will most certainly be beaming audiobooks your way. If not, I’ll try applying for a business loan again, but as nice as I might look in suits, this is the best job for me.

I’m good at it. I make the weird thing. You buy the weird thing. I spend money on making the next weird thing. Sometimes I give you a free weird thing to say thanks, sometimes that free weird thing connects to the other things.

It’s a good system.

So, that’s two books. But I promised you three.

We now enter NSFW comedy territory…

THE COSMIC COCK’S

INTERGALACTIC COMEDY BOOK.

As some of you may have noticed, I brought my comedy content back onto this main Substack because I got over that weird feeling that people who like my books might not like my comedy. I mean come on, my first (and so far only) big book is at least 50% jokes. So what was wrong with my brain?

Science has yet to answer that question. So let’s ask another.

Q: What is this new book?

A: It’s a collection of comedy short stories, by Sci-Fi and Comedy authors.

A top secret project for a long time, this book was actually first concieved in 2015 as ‘Planetary Overlap’ (a title I have since taken for my own use). I put it down because I didn’t know any funny Sci-Fi authors at the time, instead focusing my efforts on the very first Halfplanet project, a collection of art and poetry (and the odd short story) from students and professors at my uni. It was groundbreaking, weird, new. It placed established writers alongside newbies, giving both the confidence to look at their work with new eyes, knowing it was not just publishable, it was desirable.

Privately I am planning more like it, this galactic comedy book is the beginning of something quite large.

It took a long time to find the perfect writers for it. There’s a lot of contrast, a lot of talent, and an unreasonable degree of jokes. This is not a book to read if you need the toilet, but it is a book to read if your partner is asleep next to you and you want them to be grumpy in the morning because you woke them up by laughing, or going to the toilet in the bed.

Trust me, that might happen. I already know one reader who suffered that fate with WBTH, now imagine if I was very picky, hunted down other funny people, and made them write brand new stories to make you laugh.

That’s right, every single story in the galactic comedy collection will be NEW.

That was the only rule.

Oh, and they had to be funny as well.

TWO RULES.

So that’s it. That’s the end of this newsletter. I’ve announced three books. I’ve not mentioned Earthloop or The Stephanie Glitch or those reprints of my Sci-Fi Poetry books or the Rod Grasper short story series or the Comedy night I just founded or anything else. I’ve been well behaved. I’ve stayed on track.

Hopefully you’re feeling almost overwhelmed, but in a good way, like a child holding a Lego store bag that’s bigger than they are.

There’s actually more, but I’m at Substack’s email limit.

Yes, there’s that much content on the way that it’s making Substack creak.

See you soon.

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